Scrapped Samsung phone feature ‘costing fans money every month’ as ‘upset’ owners rage ‘we should not have to pay’
SAMSUNG fans have complained about the cost of storing photos and files after a major phone change.
The South Korean tech giant removed a key feature from phones in recent years – and gadget owners aren’t happy.
It used to be extremely common for Samsung smartphones to feature an SD card slot.
This allowed Samsung users to slide in a microSD card that would instantly expand their storage.
It means that even if the phone itself ran out of storage, there was an easy and cheap way to add some free space.
But Samsung didn’t include an SD card slot on its Galaxy S21 smartphone in 2021.
That was a big change from the Galaxy S20 handset that did include the feature.
Now Samsung owners are saying the change is costing them money – and they want SD card slots back.
One upset fan writing on Reddit’s Samsung forum said: “I don’t like that Samsung removed the SD card, and it is stressing me out because I want to get a new phone soon.”
“I go to the T-Mobile website to see what phones they have, but they don’t have any high- or even mid-range models that have SD card support.
“I just don’t understand, this is really a downgrade. I use my SD card for offline pictures and videos that I’ve had since 2013, and I have Google Cloud storage for back-up.
“What makes me the most upset is that they removed something that gave me and many others peace of mind by having that extra redundancy in place.
“I’m fine with paying the three dollars a month for 100GB of space, but now I have to rely solely on it.
“This also plays into the new subscription model that every company nowadays is following. You will own nothing, and you will be happy.”
Another said: “We should not have to pay extra money on a $1,000 device to save our data. We should never rely on cloud storage.
“We should have never lost a feature that was already on these ‘flagship’ phones. It’s a small change that would have hurt nothing to still have.”
And one added: “This is the biggest drawback to Samsung.”
Other users hit back, with one simply saying “deal with it”, while another said “99% of the population doesn’t care”.
Another user suggested using a dongle to insert an SD card, and noted: “Times have changed.”
The SD card slot isn’t the only feature that Samsung has removed in recent years.
Samsung – a brief history
Here's what you need to know...
- Samsung is a major South Korean company made up of many businesses that operate globally
- It’s known locally as a “chaebol”, which means “business conglomerate”
- It was founded by Lee Byung-chul in 1938 as a trading company
- But over several decades, it branched out into food processing, insurance, textiles and retail
- It wasn’t until the late 1960s when Samsung entered the electronics industry – for which it’s best known in the West today
- It also launched businesses in construction and shipbuilding in the 1970s
- Today, Samsung’s most important sources of income are its smartphones and computer chips
- The firm accounts for around a fifth of South Korea’s total exports, and roughly 17% of the country’s GDP
- More than 270,000 staff are employed by Samsung globally
- And in 2023, Samsung Electronics turned over the equivalent of $194 billion in revenue
Samsung phones now no longer feature an IR blaster that allowed the handset to function as a remote control.
And modern Samsung handsets – like the new Galaxy S24 – don’t feature headphone jacks either.
It’s not just a Samsung problem however, as Apple’s latest iPhones also don’t feature an IR blaster, headphone jack, or SD card slot.